


He hit me and it felt like a kiss

by aingeal



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Returns, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Fighting Kink, Headcanon, Hurt Steve Rogers, M/M, Memories, POV First Person, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Punching, Recognition, Recovered Memories, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-15 03:04:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17520803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aingeal/pseuds/aingeal
Summary: Steve's POV of the highway fight scene in CA:TWS.





	He hit me and it felt like a kiss

The first time I saw him again I will never forget; the way he'd moved on the highway among the speeding cars, the flip and turn of his body in the air, the way his hair lifted in the breeze as he stood still, poised. I knew it, before I knew it. I felt him before I knew him to be him.

Moments before, I had cradled Sam and Natasha with me on the amputated car door, huddled like a fleeing family before the nazis stormed their village. Have you ever been so lonely that even in mortal danger your heart has flared to merely have a loved one near. Do you know the desperation that renders every touch, even of a fabric sleeve to your own, an oasis in a desert? I know- I've been in that place of desperation. I've been that lonely. It had been that long. We had our legs entangled, and I was keeping them safe. I thought that was heaven, skidding at 50mph along the freeway with the sparks flying around us. I didn't know what heaven was- I had forgotten it. 

When I remember it now I can feel the shape of heaven in the way he carried his weapon, in the surety of his stance as he discharged the Colt M4A1 grenade launcher into my shield and flung me over the bridge and rent the shield from my hand and smashed me through the bus window. As I wheeled in the air my thoughts were all tossed from me and were replaced with the instinct of fear only. The fear was for Sam and for Natasha, up there alone now with this man-machine and his heavy ballistics. As I lay in concussed confusion I could still feel the reverb of the shell as it had hit the vibranium, felt my empty hands full of that impact. I felt the collision of the bullet as the embodiment of his will. I did not then yet know what I later knew- I did not know who he was. But the shape and the force of him was imprinted in my mind, even from the split-second glances of him that I had had. I could feel his power and it drew me to him like a magnet. I feared him, this man that was also machine, but the fear was for my friends- Sam in his short sleeve tshirt, Natasha in high heels- not for myself. For myself, I wanted to get closer. I was drawn to the brilliance of his brutality.

Even as I dodged his handlers' shots they only formed the background of my awareness. I was attuned to him. I needed to know where he was. I needed to stop him and save Sam and Natasha. But beyond that goal there was this throbbing curiosity, this cold dreadful thread that seemed to pull me to him. I didn't understand it, but I felt it. Strongly.

Sam's yelled reassurance surged me on- I should never have doubted his competence.

I lost the man and Natasha among the confusion of the cars and the panicked stampeding civilians. But then- there he was- poised like a statue with his aim on her, on the hood of a car. The stance of his legs like a sprinter on the blocks, pledging the potential they contained, the gun in his hands like an extension of his body. The promise of Natasha's death hung in the air in the microseconds it took me to sprint to him, only being denied its realisation by my shield meeting his fist.

I saw his eyes then, pale and furious beneath the dark flick of his eyebrows. They glittered above the mask. I took it all in in less than the space of a thought as his machine fist powered into my shield and threatened to knock me to the ground. It took everything I had to hold my stance, and the only way I could do so was to keep my head low behind the shield. 

I lowered my head not only in effort but to hide my gaze from the eyes I had seen, for what those eyes meant was impossible, and I was moving and reacting too fast to be able to think about impossible things.

Then his boot met my chest and he flung me away from him once more. He put the entire strength of his body into the kick, sending himself down with the counterforce, and it was like the grenade that launched me from the bridge, it felt the same- his body was as much a weapon as his guns. I felt the terrible power of him. It made me weak. Not from pain or fear but from something I could not name: the violence he wielded, but the detachment he seemed to have from it. And those eyes of his that I had seen- so cold, so distant. Eyes that didn't belong in this place, this time...

His boot met my chest and his bullet bit at my shield again and then we were both up and moving in the dance of the fight. I kicked the gun from his hand, his human hand of simple flesh, ungloved and unprotected; I flinched inside at the touch of boot rubber to skin. But he had another gun, he had so many guns, he was nothing more than a conduit for bullets to fly from, so I knocked this one away too. And then we were fighting close, and it was then that my blood seemed to surge while my heart rose to my throat and my stomach clenched and turned with a feeling I had not felt in many decades. He punched me with his flesh hand but I did not feel pain. I would have welcomed his beating, if it meant his hand on me. My eyes were trained on his face, on those eyes, that hair. With the mask he was wearing I could not be sure. I couldn't name to myself what I was seeing. I couldn't think, but my body seemed to know.

The adrenaline and the weakness in my limbs surged as he grappled my shield arm and spun me like a rag doll in the air, lifting me like I was a child. The heavy sapping mass of myself, the might of my body, seemed meaningless to him, and it reminded me of sensations my body had long forgotten, body memories from the time before, when instead of like a rock or a bullock I had been like a sapling or a fawn, and my body had felt like a feather moving through the air. The way he handled me it was like he expected my body to be that way too.

Then he had hold of my shield and my memory surged with recognition. The train, the train of death, and him there, him wielding the shield, trying to stay alive with it. In the space between the punches we threw at each other my brain stuttered, straining with the tension of a contradiction so audacious I couldn't face it directly. Him. Who was I naming? This shifter in language, the unspecific pronoun, that I was applying to this fighting machine with one and the same breath as that other him, the only him to me, that other fighter, that other man of guns and warfare, that other man of auburn hair and flashing pale eyes-

He flung me again and in the pause in which we each assessed the next moves in the dance I saw his eyes clearly once more as he brandished the shield in front of him. My brain roared with recognition but the fight was one to the death and my body moved without thought to save my life and those of my friends, and I flung myself once more into the fray. He span the shield at me like an outsized shuriken and I could have caught it. I should have caught it and used it, my true weapon, but I didn't. I ran to him and I fought him hand to hand, so close I could see the weave in the fabric of the mask, so close I could see that the bridge of his nose was marked red from its tightness.

Now he had a knife and he sped it through the air with the grace of a dragonfly. I was keeping up with the flutter and the leap of it but nothing more, I was not now fighting to win but merely to not lose. The fight had lost its meaning to me. I forgot what I was doing in the certainty I now felt blossoming inside me and the equal roar of disbelief that kept my brain in fevered confusion. I didn't want it to ever be over. If the dance of the fight would only continue, I felt, then something was bound to happen. It had to happen. It felt like we were dancing on the edge of a cliff and I was waiting for the rock to crumble beneath us and tumble us together into a void of falling and the unimaginable.

I punched him and I kicked him and I sent him into the side of a van and still I moved forward, surging with the twin instincts of my body- to fight and to win, and to be closer to him. My fight instinct was as high as the pounding of my heart and I let myself show him my power in turn: kneeing him in the chest, bending the metal of the van beneath him with the force of the kick. 

But he was a man who was also machine, and the machine that was his arm was stronger than anything I had. I wrestled him and thought I had him, immobilising his arm in a way that would have trumped any normal opponent. But before I could even take a breath there he was somehow twisting from my grasp, and then it happened. 

His metal hand closed around my throat. My hands flew up to it and squeezed, trying to dislodge his grip, but they met nothing but hard and cold resistance, pure machine and pure intent that would never yield, not even to my super-powered muscle and bone. The metal hand squeezed me so hard and so fast that I could feel my death an instant away. Then he drew me closer to him, so close his hair floated in my pulsating vision, and I could smell the oily stink of his arm, and hear the rasp of his breath behind the mask. Without the mask I think I would have felt his breath on my face. He held me close to him for a moment, while my death seemed to dance before me, but then he did something I still don't understand. He threw me away from him like a used rag. He threw me and threw my life back to me with one thrust of his arm.

The fight continued but now I could see he was looking at me. He was looking at me the way I was looking at him, I thought- with bloodlust and fury, and confusion, and intrigue. We had to fight because that is what our bodies were compelled to do, because we had been made into fighters and placed on opposing sides, but our minds were not thinking the thoughts that fighters have. I know mine wasn't. I will never know for sure, but I think that when he threw me away from the death grip he had had on my throat, he was not thinking the thoughts of a fighter.

But then of course, with the inevitable inertia of a bad dream, we were fighting again, and now I was desperate, I was fumbling the shield, I was panting, and my body was disobeying me, because we could not escape this unfolding fate that swept us along the path of violence, and my mind was screaming to somehow stop all this and pull that mask off his face and fall into some other universe with him, where he was not this and I was not what I had become and we were not here and not doing this to each other. He had his knife though, and so I had to fight him to stay alive. But I could still feel the pressure of the metal hand around my throat. I could still feel his touch.

The first time he had touched me in 70 years. Adrenalin was flipping my stomach over and my heart was a steady high and hard timpani in my throat and I felt not like a prey animal or like a dog in a fight, but like a lover. Like a lover or like a fighter, I could not tell the difference, I held him around his waist and turned him and hefted him and threw him, and he flipped in the air like a dancer, and when he came down his mask fell to the ground.

And there he was, on the street with his chaos strewn around him and the green of the spring DC trees behind him. His hair longer than I had ever seen it, but it was his hair. The stubble was his stubble, and it was on his jaw, on his chin, on the dimple there that I knew so well. Those lips were his, their sensitivity beneath the flare of his nostrils as vivid to me as they had always been.

Then, as soon as I knew him, he was gone. I didn't even hear myself breathe his name. 

Bucky.


End file.
